MicroStrategy ONE

Best practices for designing effective documents

Before you begin creating a document, review the best practices listed below. These suggestions will help you design an effective, attractive, and practical document.

The best practices are grouped into the following sections:

Gather information about your user audience

Ask yourself who the audience is for the document you plan to create. Questions you should have answers to include:

  • What is the main topic area the document needs to address? In other words, at a general level, what do users need to know?

  • What level of detail do users need? For example, sometimes executive level users only want to see a few key metrics of certain data. Other analysts may need to see very detailed financial numbers or inventory counts.

  • What types of documents do users expect? Higher level executives sometimes have expectations about how data is displayed in a document, so it can be helpful to ask what types of documents they are used to receiving, and whether it is important to try to adhere to that data display style.

  • Who is your universe of users made up of?

    • If your universe of users is extremely diverse, consider making documents as flexible as possible for each user who executes them, by adding prompts. A prompt asks users questions about the results they want to see on a document, and then submits the appropriate query to the data source. For an introduction to prompts, see the Basic Reporting Guide.

    • Your universe of users may include different security requirements. For example, you may need a single document for a group of users, but that group includes both external and internal users, and you want to restrict some data from external view. You must confirm that appropriate security is in place for a document's underlying objects, and that security filters are in place to control row-level access to data. Object-level security is performed using ACLs, or access control lists.

      Security filters and ACLs are generally implemented by your system administrator, but one or both may be under the control of your project designer. See the System Administration Guide for details on security filters, ACLs, and other security features.

Gather information about your data source

If you need an introduction to or refresher on data sources, see the Basic Reporting Guide.

Make sure the data your organization stores can support the information your users want to analyze in a reporting environment. Questions you should ask include:

  • Does your organization gather the data that users want to see documents on?

  • Is your data organized in such a way that it can be used? Is the data reliable, and is it clean? One way to check on the reliability of your data is to create some simple grid reports designed to validate whether your data reflects your understanding of reality.

    For example, if you have a good sense of how many customers own two or three of your organization's products, create a report that shows basic data on the count of customers who purchased those specific products over the past few years. If the numbers you see in the report do not come close to what you expected to see, it is worthwhile to spend some time with your database administrator to address the reliability of the data stored in your data source.

Gather information about your MicroStrategy project

Many of the objects within a project are generally created by the project's designer when the project is first created. Since you use these objects to design datasets for documents, it can be useful to understand your project's design, and specifically how the project's objects reflect the actual data in your organization's data source. In this way, you can choose objects to use in datasets with full knowledge of the data source tables that data is coming from when the document is executed.

For details on general project design and data modeling, see the Project Design Guide.

Questions you should ask about your project include:

  • Do objects exist in the MicroStrategy metadata which match what users want to see on documents? If not, you (or a user with the appropriate privileges) can create them.

    MicroStrategy provides flexibility in combining information from your data source into specific objects which reflect the concepts that make sense to your users. Consolidations and custom groups are just two examples of ways you can present data to your users in a way that does not directly reflect your data source's storage structure. For an introduction to consolidations and custom groups, see the Advanced Reporting Guide.

  • What VLDB (Very Large Database) options have been set? These settings affect how the SQL is written when a document sends a SQL query to your data source. VLDB settings are usually determined by an administrator, but some may also be defined by a project's designer. All VLDB settings are described in detail in the MicroStrategy Supplemental Reference for System Administration.

  • What project configuration settings have been set that will affect reports or documents? Ask your project designer about any configuration settings made for the project as a whole, because most reports and report objects revert to the project's settings when no object-specific or report-specific settings override them.

Locate or create time-savers

  • Before you create a document, search through MicroStrategy to see whether a similar document already exists that can serve the same purpose as the document you intend to create. This can save you time and help you avoid unnecessary duplication in your MicroStrategy metadata.

    You can deploy out-of-the-box documents to your project by reconciling the documents' content to your own project objects. For example, you can use a Report Services document or dashboard from the MicroStrategy Tutorial project in your own project. To do this, you use the portable documents feature. A portable document contains all the design of the document without the data, allowing you to copy documents between projects, even when the projects do not have the same metadata. When you import the document into the replacement project, you map the document to the new project (referred to as reconciling the document). For steps to create and reconcile portable documents, see Portable documents: Reusing documents across projects.

  • Before you create the finished document, use Microsoft Excel, Paint, PowerPoint, or another tool to create a mock-up of the document you intend to design. Send the mock-up to your user community to gather their feedback on its usefulness. This can save you valuable time creating a complex, finished document that may have to be redone.

  • You can select multiple controls on a document so that you can perform an action on all of them, such as formatting, aligning, or sizing. To select multiple controls, press and hold CTRL while you click each control.

Design the Report Services document or dashboard effectively

  • Hide unused document sections (by collapsing the section on the template) so that the document is easier to work with. See Displaying, hiding, and resizing document sections.

  • Use the grouping feature and/or incremental fetch to minimize the amount of data passed between the web server and the web browser, for documents designed to be viewed in MicroStrategy Web. See Grouping records in a document and Improving Document Performance.

  • Determine whether the dataset(s) will return a large amount of data. If so, consider adding grouping to the document, by choosing which attributes you want to group the pages by. See Grouping records in a document.

  • Make the following decisions as you are planning the design of your document, not after you are finished:

  • Do not include so many graphical objects that the data becomes unimportant. Make sure the data is the main focus of the document. The overall goal is to achieve a clean look.

  • Plan your design so that all related data can be seen on a single screen or page, and that it can be interpreted from the top left to the bottom right.

  • Save your document frequently as you design and make formatting changes to it.